473235 - How should pausing a video stream be displayed/handled?

Status: NEW

(Toolkit :: Video/Audio Controls, enhancement)

Description

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

So, here's a interesting scenario...

1) Start playing a streaming video (ie, one of indeterminate length)
2) Get progress events... event.loaded = a byte count, .total == -1.
3) Click play.
4) Get timeupdate events... .currentTime = a time, .duration == NaN
5) Click pause.
6) timeupdate events stop, progress events continue.

All normal and expected. But, how to indicate this in a UI?

We already can't do anything for the buffering status bar; you just can't really show progress for an infinite/indeterminate stream.

But for the playback position, it seems like it would be nice to be able to push the indicator towards the left (backwards), so that the space to the right shows the amount of time that's been buffered but not yet played.

EG:

Scrubber bar while playing normally, scrubber thumb at the far right:
============|
Click pause, data starts buffering:
===========|=
==========|==
=========|===
Drag scrubber to the end, to get back to real-time playback
============|

But it's not clear there's any way to do something like that. After clicking pause, we'd need to be able to know "there are X seconds of buffered-but-unplayed media" from the lastmost played media position. But .total and .duration shouldn't change, because it's still streaming in.

Another route to go would be to just not support this (the spec doesn't seem to anyway)... Don't allow seeking within a stream, and when playback is resumed always jump to the end (or near the end, so we don't immediately stall?).

Video is hard. :(

Comment 1

[Jared Wein [:jaws] (please needinfo? me)]

Do you know of a test site that offers live streaming video? I wonder if this was fixed indirectly over the years since it was filed.

Comment 2

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

I don't know of a site offhand, at least one providing a simple video stream.

I suspect this is less important now that popular sites (YouTube, ustream, Facebook Live, etc) off streaming with their own customized controls, but it's still valid.